Behind Obama’s Cool

By GARRY WILLS

Published: April 7, 2010

In 2004, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state’s candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President Bush do a double take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it spelled “Obama,” not “Osama.” Bush shrugged: “I don’t know him.” She answered, “You will.” Not long after this, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and many people suddenly knew him. It happened so fast that he seemed to come out of nowhere. The truth was more intriguing — he had come out of everywhere.

Audio

Peter Thompson for The New York Times

Barack Obama in 2004.

His multiple points of origin made him adaptable to any situation. What could have been a source of confusion or uncertain identity he meant to turn into an overwhelming advantage. As he told a Chicago Reader interviewer in 2000:

“My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people.”

David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made the same or similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show that he has more direct ties to Africa than most ­African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother’s Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. He is a bit of a chameleon or shape-shifter, but he does not come across as insincere — that is the importance of his famous “cool.” He does not have the hot eagerness of the con man. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people’s narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.

Remnick takes as the keynote of his book a saying by Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights hero of the Selma march: “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.” Remnick begins “The Bridge” with a set piece on the 2007 commemorations of the Selma march. Obama had just begun his presidential campaign, and he went to Selma to claim its civil rights legacy as his own. At the time, Hillary Clinton led him in support among blacks by three to one. Even Lewis would be on her side, at first. The Clintons had a long and excellent record with African-Americans. Obama was 3 years old at the time of the Selma march, and he was living in Hawaii, far from the civil rights turmoil of the ’60s.

In his first race for Congress, against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, Obama was branded “not black enough.” He was not the descendant of American slaves. He had not participated in the civil rights struggle. He was not a militant activist. Nonetheless, Obama spoke at Brown Chapel in 2007, the launch site of the Selma march. Hillary Clinton was slow to make arrangements and had to settle for the less iconic First Baptist Church. She spoke well enough. Remnick is unfair to her, saying she dropped her g’s and gave a northern Illinois version of Southspeak, “channeling her inner Blanche DuBois.” In fact, Clinton is a natural mimic who “does the voices” when she tells a story — I have heard her become a Southern judge and a black woman preacher when describing one of her law cases. This got her into trouble when she “channeled” Tammy Wynette. Obama has the same gift. When he reads the audio version of “Dreams From My Father,” he speaks, in turn, like his Kenyan relatives, his Kansas relatives and the street kids he met in New York.

The difference between the two ­speeches that day in Selma lay less in delivery than in Obama’s way of making the events of his life story meld with those of his audience. He was laying claim to the black struggle as his own. He said: “My grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that’s all he was — a cook and a houseboy. And that’s what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a houseboy. They wouldn’t call him by his last name. Call him by his first name. Sound familiar?” Actually, Remnick shows that Obama’s grandfather was a respected village elder and property owner, who left his native town for Nairobi to cook for British colonials, and then traveled with British troops to Burma, bringing back their Western clothes and ways to his village.

In Selma, Obama claimed that his father was the beneficiary of the civil rights movement because it made the American government bring Kenyans, including his father, to the United States: “So the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country.” Remnick proves that the airlift was an idea for the improvement of Kenya, conceived and implemented by the Kenyan leader Tom Mboya, who came to America and raised funds from private sources, including Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. It was only after Obama’s father had flown in the first airlift that John Kennedy contributed to the airlift, also from private (not government) funds.